Killer Riffs: A Guide to Parody in Popular Music

From the Residents’ freakish Beatles sendups, to Spinal Tap’s meta-metal escapades, to the gastronomic goofs of “Weird Al,” a chronicle of those who have turned pastiche and mimicry into an art form across the last 50 years.

For centuries, parody has been a pastime for the clever young. Writing verse, stories, plays, or pieces of music in the style of famous others achieves a double whammy: It takes knowledge and skill to mimic the mannerisms of an individual artist (or a genre) while simultaneously poking insubordinate fun at the renowned and respected. There’s something intrinsically puerile—mocking your elders and betters—about parody, and to pull one off successfully requires a blend of craft and cruelty. But even at its meanest, the parody is a backhanded compliment: You can only be caricatured if you’re distinctive and stylistically striking. That’s why pop stars are nearly always delighted when “Weird Al” Yankovic targets them: It’s a sign you’ve made it.

Outside observers started taking the piss out of rock’n’roll as soon it became a mainstream phenomenon. One example is Fred Astaire’s “The Ritz Roll and Rock,” from the 1957 movie Silk Stockings. The full history of comedians parodying popular music performers would take up an essay in its own right: The lineage encompasses National Lampoon’s Lemmings, “Saturday Night Live,” Tenacious D, and the Lonely Island, as well as non-U.S. exponents like the Young Ones, Flight of the Conchords, and the Mighty Boosh. In this chronological survey, though, I concentrate on cases where rock mocks itself, and parody is used as an elastic concept covering related practices like pastiche, the creative cover version, and work that relies heavily on quotation or allusion.

Working on my glam history Shock and Awe, I became fascinated by rock’s peculiar compulsion to comment on itself or fold back on its own history self-reflexively, through mixed motives of irreverence and nostalgia, campy irony and sentimental affection. Teeming with homages, invocations, references, and revivals, glam rock was pop culture inventing postmodernism all by itself, years before the concept achieved mainstream currency. That spirit remains a riotous presence in our culture with the explosion of online parody. As much as we feel awestruck fascination for the famous, it seems we’re equally driven to demystify and deride them.

Sending up “Leader of the Pack” and the entire genre of teen tragedy songs, “Leader of the Laundromat” flips the girl-group viewpoint to the male adolescent perspective. A couple splits up in the street; the girl grabs his washing, runs distraught into the road, and collides fatally with a passing garbage truck.“I felt so messy standing there/My daddy’s shorts were everywhere.” Mimicking Shangri-Las producer Shadow Morton’s hallmarks, “Laundromat” adds accident sound effects and slathers the vocals with echo. The single made the Billboard Top 20 in early 1965—and the Detergents were promptly sued by Morton and “Pack” co-writers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.

As both the primary songwriter of the Move and the studio wizard behind Wizzard’s glam-era streak of smash hits, UK eccentric Roy Wood was ahead of his time in being behind of his time: His pastiche approach anticipated the record-collector magpie sensibility of figures like Nick Lowe, R. Stevie Moore, Marshall Crenshaw, and Ariel Pink. But perhaps Wood’s most bizarrely ahead-of-schedule achievement was inventing ’60s nostalgia while the ’60s were still in full swing. On the flipside of the Move 1967’s psychedelic hit “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” you can find “Wave the Flag and Stop the Train”—a replica of the Beatles’ sound circa 1965, with the bass riff in particular highly redolent of “Day Tripper.” As pop scholar Philip Auslander observes, while the A-side has the Move following the contemporary lead of the Fab Four in “Strawberry Fields Forever” mode, the B-side backtracks to an earlier stage of their development. So accelerated was pop time in the ’60s that only two years earlier could seem like a distant age.

Parody is a lightweight business on the whole. Yet it has a curious allure for artistic heavyweights, as a sideline activity for innovators like Zappa, Bowie, and the Beatles. “Back in the U.S.S.R” was their first full-blown foray into pastiche: The title nods to Chuck Berry, the chorus and vocal sound recreates classic-era Beach Boys, and there’s a lyric allusion to Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” (but in this case referencing the then Soviet Republic rather than the Deep South state). “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was the lead single from The Beatles, a double album sprawl of creativity but also of recreativity, with the Fab Four referencing other musicians like Dylan as well as earlier phases of their own music. As critic Carl Belz pointed out at the time, this was a striking break with the reigning late ’60s ethos of progression: The Beatles were “going back over musical territory which they have already covered, which they already know, and which they have left.” Postmodernism, in other words.

A satirical sneer is integral to so much of Frank Zappa’s work. The snark target is often a contemporary pop fad or one of his own peers, whether it’s the Love Generation-mocking We’re Only in It for the Money (artwork that parodied Sgt. Pepper’s cover, the “Hey Joe”-ripping and hippie-deriding “Flower Punk”) through to the disco spoof “Dancin’ Fool.” Cruising with Ruben & the Jets is a curiosity in the Zappa discography, not just because it’s a whole album based around pastiche, but because it’s genuinely and wistfully affectionate towards the caricatured genre in question, doo-wop.

“I’m very fond of close-harmony, group-vocal ‘oo-wah’ rock and roll,” Zappa confessed in 1969. Typically, though, he liked to stress the conceptual element, talking about “the scientific side of Ruben & the Jets” and describing it as “an experiment in cliche collages,” with each song a “careful conglomerate” of “stereotyped motifs.” Yet the album—which saw the Mothers playing the role of a fictitious ’50s vocal group like the Flamingos—doesn’t sound like a cold-blooded dissection/deconstruction. The caricature only works to intensify doo-wop’s appealing traits: the happy-sad basslines, the wobbly emotion of the warbling vocals. Woozy and droopy, the effect is like an ice cream cake left to melt in the sun. Still, Zappa couldn’t resist having some mischief with what he called doo-wop’s “imbecile words”: “Stuff Up the Cracks” is about suicide as the remedy for heartbreak.

During that same winter of 1968, the Turtles out-did Zappa’s fictitious-band gambit by a factor of 11. Battle of the Bands’ inner gatefold shows the Turtles garbed as radically different combos with names like the Atomic Enchilada, Fats Mallard and the Bluegrass Fireball, and Nature’s Children. On the record itself, the group expertly simulate a gamut of styles, including surf-pop, steel-guitar-twangy country, and, with the Bigg Brothers’ “Food,” psychedelia at its most effete. Some of the targets are hard to pinpoint now, possibly referencing subgenres long lost in the turnover of late ’60s trends. The L.A. Bust ’66’s “Oh, Daddy!,” for instance, sounds like the Monkees until mid-song, when a carousing jazz troupe disrupts the vibe, yet the imaginary group’s image, all long hair and headbands, resembles Santana. Something of an over-extended joke, Battle of the Bands served as template for the breakaway duo Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan’s career as Flo & Eddie.

Although Spike Jones and his City Slickers took the mickey out of American pop culture of the ’40s and ’50s with the Musical Depreciation Revue, the first rock-era outfit wholly dedicated to parody was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Centered around singer-trumpeter Vivian Stanshall and singer-music-man Neil Innes, the Bonzos came out of the same Anglo-Surrealist comedy sensibility that produced Monty Python; indeed they were the resident band on “Do Not Adjust Your Set,” a kids TV show that involved future Pythons Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. As with Python, their absurdist nonsense was a cathartic protest against the repressions of English middle-class life. Stanshall talked disparagingly about “Normals,” suburban drones trapped in inane routine: It’s they who were the “really dreadful freaks,” not bohemian eccentrics like himself.

Parody, then, was for the Bonzos the aesthetic counterpart to their rejection of common sense reality. Probably their most famous skit is “The Intro and the Outro,” a smarmy-voiced “introducing the band” routine with each player allowed a brief flourish in the spotlight: The patter rapidly extends beyond the actual group to public and historical figures like Charles De Gaulle (on Gallic accordion, of course) and Adolf Hitler (“looking very relaxed... on vibes... nice”). Elsewhere in the discography, there’s a spoof on Elvis in country ballad mode (“Canyons of Your Mind”), a merciless skewering of late ’60s minstrelsy (“Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?”), a Wilson Pickett take-off (“Trouser Press”), and a teen-pop parody that tells the unsavory truth about adolescence (“King of Scurf”). But the Bonzos don’t spare the freaks, either—even though they were considered counter-culture fellow-travelers—sending up psychedelia on “We Are Normal.” As with so many parodists, the Bonzos’ secret shame, or at least fatal weakness, is their deep attachment to the clichés and conventions they mock: They poke and pick away at them, but never quite transcend.

Roxy’s music is a battle zone in which contradictory impulses fight it out: Proggy-modernism that puts them in the company of King Crimson and Can versus campy retro born of Bryan Ferry’s pop art schooling and love of pre-rock songwriters like Cole Porter. When the latter tendency prevailed, you got cocktail music-meets-doo-wop tunes like “Bitters End” or the deliciously knowing references to psychedelia in “In Every Dream Home a Heartache.” Roxy laid out their proto-pomo sensibility with the mission-statement of their debut album’s opening track, “Re-Make/Re-Model.” Possibly in homage to “The Intro and the Outro” (Eno loved the Bonzos), the song ends with each member taking a short solo—and in each case, it’s a famous musical quote, from “Day Tripper” to “Ride of the Valkyries,” with Andy Mackay rendering Wagner’s fanfare riff in the raucous rock’n’roll sax style of King Curtis.

Forgery was integral to Bowie’s approach from the off. He started out virtually a clone of British musical theatre star Anthony Newley. Intensive studies of mime seemed only to intensify this mimetic streak. On The Man Who Sold the World, “Black Country Rock” apes the goat-like bleat of his friendly rival Marc Bolan; Hunky Dory’s “Queen Bitch” photocopies the Velvet Underground circa Loaded; “The Jean Genie” takes 1965 Stones as its template, right down to the smoky rasp of harmonica. But Bowie really put the past into pastiche with 1973’s Pinups, a covers album dedicated to mid-’60s Brits like the Who and the Pretty Things. Although the overt intention is fanboy homage to mod and psych tunes that meant so much to the young Davie Jones, the effect is closer to travesty: With only a few exceptions, each version hollows out the insurrectionary energy of the original and leaves just a stylized shell. This is nowhere more apparent than with the mannered rendition of the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind.” Bowie saw himself as an actor more than a musician, but ham like this would have seen him howled off any West End stage.

Like their contemporaries ELO and Elton John, 10cc combined huge knowledge of rock and pop history with consummate studio craftsmanship. This sheer facility with the arrangement of sound made them susceptible to the lure of pastiche. For every astonishing feat of innovative production like “I’m Not in Love,” there was an exquisitely exact counterfeit. “Johnny Don't Do It” was praised by Rolling Stone’s Greg Shaw as the best satire of teenage motorcycle death songs since “Leader of the Laundromat”; “Donna” did the same trick with the ’50s lovesick ballad; “Rubber Bullets” combined Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” and the Beach Boys to make a wry comment on the Attica State prison uprising.

Gary Glitter: “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am!)” (1973)

One of the biggest pop stars of the British ’70s, now disgraced for sex crimes, Gary Glitter could easily have been called Terry Tinsel: The moniker originated as a jape among showbiz pals trying to think up the most preposterous stage name. The alter-ego flashed back to the British ’50s, when star-making Svengalis like Larry Parnes gave their working class rock’n’roll proteges names like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, and Duffy Power. Glitter’s lyrics referenced ’50s Americana like jukebox halls and motorbike gangs; his silver-foil costumes were a burlesque amplification of Little Richard crossed with Liberace. But the brutally crunching minimalism of the sound created by his producer Mike Leander was utterly modern: not a replica but a reinvention of rock’n’roll for the grim, socially-fractured UK of the early ’70s.

Following swiftly in Glitter’s wake, Alvin Stardust was more straightforwardly revivalist, his black leather, sideburn-and-quiff image based on a single precursor, Gene Vincent. (Originally the first name of his alias was “Elvin”: a composite of Elvis and Vincent.) The Stardust persona was actually invented by A&R/producer Peter Shelley, who sang the first hit “My Coo Ca Choo,” then recruited someone else to be the public face and voice of Alvin Stardust: Bernard Jewry, who’d previously had modest success in the ’60s as singer of Shane Fenton and the Fentones. Bizarrely, Jewry had been that group’s roadie originally and then replaced the original Shane Fenton, who died when he was 16 years old.

First Class: “Bobby Dazzler” (1974)

Perhaps inside industry knowledge informed “Bobby Dazzler,” First Class’ spoof on the Glitter/Stardust syndrome, which accuses them of being the puppets of Svengalis who “stood you in the ring and painted you like a clown.” But “Bobby Dazzler” failed to make the charts and Gary and Alvin had the last laugh, scoring hits well into the next decade—Stardust as late as 1984’s “I Feel Like Buddy Holly.”

Wizzard: “See My Baby Jive” (1973)

Wizzard leader Roy Wood’s records are exercises in wish-fulfilment somewhere between time-travel and cosplay. On huge UK hits “See My Baby Jive” and “Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad),” he out-Spectors Spector with blaring updates of the multi-tracked “symphony for little kids” sound. Solo single “Forever” is a composite of Beach Boys and Neil Sedaka so indebted that Wood inscribed “with special thanks to Brian Wilson and Neil Sedaka for their influence” on the 7" label. On the second Wizzard album Introducing Eddie and the Falcons, Wood recycles the already-quite-tired fictitious band gambit, although the packaging—which includes a business card declaring that the Falcons are available for weddings and social functions—is a hoot.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Genre-blending horror, comedy, and musical, Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise is a rock-biz satire swiping at many of the fads of the early ’70s, including glam (in the form of outrageously camp singer Beef) and shock rock (the Alice Cooper-like outfit the Undeads). But another trend that gets mocked is nostalgia and the ’50s revival: Before they are remodeled as the Undeads, that group are the Juicy Fruits, a transparent rip on Sha Na Na. The movie’s central figure, sinister super-producer Swan (played by Paul Williams) declares that “the future of rock’n’roll is its past.” Phantom flopped at the time, but among its unlikely legacy is Daft Punk, who hailed it as “our favorite film, the foundation for a lot of what we’re about artistically,” and invited Williams to sing on Random Access Memories.